98819: Programmers saying: “If you like this program then you can donate to the programmer”

Computer programmers employ different techniques to sell their programs. One of them is to make the program available for all to use for free. They may add an account number and say: “if you like the program you can donate to the programmer on account number…” and if it is a website they write: “donate to the website”. Is this considered an immoral method of selling, a gift, or taken out of embarrassment?.

Praise be to Allaah.

This kind of gift is
subject to some conditions, which is his saying: If you like this program
then you can donate to the programmer. This condition clearly shows that
this is not a sale, because the word donation means that the owner or
programmer is not stipulating that the user of the program should pay a
specific amount in return for using it.

Based on this, this
condition makes this transaction a gift.

A gift may become a sale if
the giver stipulates that the recipient has to give him a certain amount of
money, for example, in return for the gift.

Ibn Qudaamah said in
al-Mughni (5/398): If a specific reward is stipulated in return for the
gift, that is valid, as was stated by Ahmad, and it comes under the same
ruling as sales. End quote.

Thus it is clear that there
is nothing wrong with using this program, without paying anything, and that
is not an invalid transaction, and it is not like taking people’s money by
means of embarrassment, because there is no room for embarrassment or
shyness here. The owner of the program cannot see the user and he does not
know him, so it cannot be imagined that he would feel embarrassed before
him.